[HN Gopher] Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be uniq...
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Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
Author : docmechanic
Score : 186 points
Date : 2025-04-07 15:51 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newscientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newscientist.com)
| pvg wrote:
| Recent smol thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575088
| docmechanic wrote:
| Thank you for sharing!
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _In the Calls of Bonobos, Scientists Hear Hints of Language_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43601682 - April 2025 (2
| comments)
|
| _Bonobos ' calls may be the closest thing to animal language
| we've seen_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575088 -
| April 2025 (12 comments)
| Y_Y wrote:
| and then spend most of their time arguing about it?
| mrtobo wrote:
| Anyone know where we can hear such recordings?
| smusamashah wrote:
| > They recorded over 300 of these observations, including what
| the caller was doing at the time, what was happening in the
| environment and the behaviour of the caller and audience after
| the vocalisation.
|
| > To reveal the meaning of each call, they used a technique from
| linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing
| vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer
| together. "We kind of established this dictionary," says
| Berthlet. "We have one vocalisation and one meaning."
|
| This is lots of manual effort, could the recent advancement in
| language models help decode animal languages more easily? I guess
| it will need lots 24/7 capture of physical movement/action and
| sound data and train a model (that already understands vocal
| English too) perhaps.
| bbor wrote:
| I definitely think you're touching on some exciting
| possibilities, but adding a language model at this early stage
| would endanger the goal of this particular research: proving
| that the compositionality exists in the first place. If there
| was a foundational language model we're involved, it might be
| reading patterns into the calls regardless of whether they're
| really there -- that _is_ what it's designed to do, after all!
|
| Re:"lots of work", I think you're misunderstanding the quotes a
| bit. They applied PCA to categorical data to generate semantic
| positions for each call type--or, in other words, ran a
| prewritten mathy algo on a big csv. _Collecting_ the CSV data
| in the first place certainly sounds extremely hard, but that's
| more of a practical issue than a scientific one! Bonobos aren't
| known for living in easy-to-reach places ;)
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| If you make that cloud exist in a high enough number of
| dimensions you'll find yourself emulating a machine learning
| language model. :)
| keybored wrote:
| Making models of the physical world is a lot of work. Can't
| they install cameras and record hundreds of thousands of hours
| of objects getting shot through cannons, birds flying and trees
| swaying in the wind? Maybe with some more nuclear power plants
| they could get close to approximating something like Newton's
| Laws of Motion (kind of close is good enough, no need to be
| nerdy about it).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It is funny how at least the press written about this sort of
| research seems to imply only humans have language and some new
| evidence might challenge that notion.
|
| Really if you ever own a pet, probably any pet I bet, you find
| that communication in a way that is arguably a language is pretty
| low level stuff in the animal kingdom. And it makes sense as it
| is quite useful for a species to communicate things about the
| world. You turn your community into a meta organism: rather than
| continuous appendages and nerve endings you might have a meerkat
| a couple hundred yards observing for predators for you sharing
| their own senses on their own body with you through their long
| distance communication abilities in the form of their
| vocalizations or body language. Now you can solely be a meerkat
| and get all this information about the area without having to
| evolve into some lovecraftian horror with a set of eyes and ears
| every 100 yards.
| empath75 wrote:
| Language is not just "communication" and not every
| communication is language. Bees and ants communicate
| information chemically, but they're not using a structured
| language. Dogs may growl to intimidate or yelp if they get
| hurt, and that surely communicates information, but whether
| they are using a structured language is a matter of research.
| floxy wrote:
| Honey bees do the waggle dance though:
|
| https://animalwise.org/2011/08/25/the-honeybee-waggle-
| dance-...
| empath75 wrote:
| Yeah, but that's just another example of communication-
| without-language
| foltik wrote:
| But isn't what whatever we call language just a few more
| levels of recursion in fundamentally the same continuous
| process?
| nkrisc wrote:
| I don't think anyone denies that _communication_ is not unique
| to humans. It is clearly not. But what is (apparently - as far
| as we know) unique to humans is language, meaning the capacity
| to combine concepts in an infinitely recursive manner to
| represent an infinity of concepts and ideas. On top of that, we
| also posses the ability to communicate (verbally, through sign,
| or more recently through writing) those combined concepts in
| such a way that other humans can then recreate that concept in
| their own mind.
|
| There's evidence that language first evolved as a capacity for
| processing the outside world internally - your inner voice, if
| you will. The ability to synthesize any idea about things you
| can and can not see or even ever experience. The speaking and
| communicative part of it may have actually arisen secondarily,
| as evidenced by the fact that "language" does not have to be
| spoken - it can be expressed in many different mediums.
|
| Communication and language are not one in the same. Language is
| a means of communication, but it also so much more than that.
|
| I found the book Why Only Us by Chomsky and Berwick to a be a
| great introduction to the topic.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You don't think a meerkat when introduced something novel
| into their environment relevant to them, would 't come up
| with a concept for representing that idea to their own
| species? I think they would, absolutely. What we do as humans
| isn't unique despite how we insist on thinking that about
| ourselves. It is why we can study neuroscience using fruit
| flies.
| ang_cire wrote:
| > the capacity to combine concepts in an infinitely recursive
| manner to represent an infinity of concepts and ideas. On top
| of that, we also posses the ability to communicate (verbally,
| through sign, or more recently through writing) those
| combined concepts in such a way that other humans can then
| recreate that concept in their own mind.
|
| We don't know that animals can't. We know that some animals
| can convey detailed information very extensively, but we
| don't know the structure of the communication well enough as
| to claim that it isn't via something equivalent to human
| language. Crows, for instance, can inform other crows about
| specific people, or characteristics of people, without those
| things being present. That would generally require
| _descriptive_ communication to do, which inherently implies
| an abstraction. Where 's the line between that and human
| language?
| BirAdam wrote:
| I was going to mention this as well. Further, I remember
| reading dolphins being capable of similar feats. I also
| remember hearing about regional animals dialects.
|
| Any animals capable of providing accurate descriptions of
| things to one another would have to be using something like
| language. It would require both some kind symbolic thought
| and structure of those symbols whether they be auditory,
| visual, or a combination of the two.
|
| If people want to use "language" for humans alone, okay...
| but it is quite clear that some animals use a communication
| system nearly as complex if not equivalent.
| bbor wrote:
| This is a lively debate in linguistics, so while it's not
| _objectively true_ (i.e. it depends on how you want to use the
| word), it's much more justified than you're implying here. As
| others have said, it's about distinguishing the kind of
| communication humans do from simple animal communication -- a
| common hook for this topic is the fun fact that "chimpanzees
| can learn sign language, but they've never asked a question".
| It's somewhat analogous to how animal communication can be seen
| as categorically distinct from simple _signaling_ done by
| flowers, scent markers, etc.
|
| I'm in a bit of a rush but suffice to say that Chomsky is
| probably the best champion of the "language is compositional"
| view, or as he puts it, "language is the generation of an
| infinite range of meaningful outputs from a finite range of
| inputs". There's dozens of great, layperson-friendly talks of
| his on this topic on YouTube, for anyone who's curious!
| keybored wrote:
| The study of human language is linguistics. A related study is
| "human language" compared to some other "[animal] language".
| Chomsky has argued that "human language" is categorically
| different from some, say, other primate "language".
|
| As soon as you have a scientific pursuit you need to define it.
| Somehow. And it isn't gonna be close to some intuitive notion
| of "language". Because that's just, I dunno, any kind of
| semiotics to us average persons. (Is your pet jumping up on
| your leg and wagging its tail communicating meaning? Yeah)
|
| So of course there's gonna be some definition of language, and
| maybe even a scientific consensus one way or the other with
| regards to sundries questions, like if other animals have
| "language" similar to "human language". And it's gonna have
| very little overlap with people vibing with their pets.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| There has been a LOT of research on this. A popsci book I've
| read on the topic is Adam's Tongue. It details the features
| that separate what's called Animal Communication Systems from
| human language.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Adams-Tongue-Humans-Made-Language-ebo...
|
| Obviously pets are quite capable of making their wishes known
| to us, especially if we facilitate it. It's unclear whether
| they're actually achieving language. I'm tempted to think they
| are, especially when I see dogs using push buttons to talk to
| us on Instagram. But I can't be totally sure.
|
| And even if they were, it would be language we taught them. Not
| independently developed in the wild.
| com2kid wrote:
| I had a dog that you could ask to do complex tasks and he'd
| happily go about and do it.
|
| "Go around the corner and get your toy out of the laundry
| basket".
|
| He'd go around the corner and get his toy out of the laundry
| basket.
|
| You could also ask him to get dressed (he'd get his rain coat
| and do his best to put it on) and you could ask him to get
| other dogs ready to go (he'd grab their leashes and drape the
| leash around the other dog's necks).
|
| > Not independently developed in the wild.
|
| I'm pretty sure the crows who live next to my house have a
| complex language. Different squawks for different
| circumstances. I can tell when one is addressing me vs when
| the male is calling to his partner.
|
| > And even if they were, it would be language we taught them.
|
| Humans smarted their way into a surplus of food, which
| allowed us to do lots of other cool things like have time for
| art, language, and spending years and years raising our
| young.
|
| That doesn't mean we are inherently superior, it just means
| an excess of food allows plenty of time to do non-food
| related things.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| It's been awhile since I read the book, but I do seem to
| remember them discussing crows specifically.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| they're called Large Language Monkeys
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Cute.
| layer8 wrote:
| In the article it says that "This finding doesn't mean that
| bonobos have language, though".
| vinceguidry wrote:
| If you really wanted your pedantry to sound smart, you'd have
| also noted that bonobos aren't monkeys, they're apes.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets
| humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but
| rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those
| writings available to future generations to build on. We're a
| species distinguished from all others by our information-archival
| and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a
| librarian species. Homo archivum. In my opinion.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Thanks for validating my data-hoarding tendencies.
|
| I'm just following my Homo Archivium genetic programming.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > calls that seem to mean "pay attention to me" and "I am
| excited" to say "pay attention to me because I am in distress"
|
| It's hard to say how accurate those meanings are, but it does
| interestingly track with the odd thing that does separate
| humans from other hominids... we ask questions. Apes who
| learned sign language have supposedly never done so.
|
| To write down knowledge means having a concept that others have
| information that you don't, and you can access it in their
| writings or give them information with yours. If you can't
| conceive of that in the first place, writing doesn't even make
| sense at all.
| ghc wrote:
| If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of
| humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly
| different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true.
|
| We also know that groups without writing systems were
| historically able to adopt writing systems rather quickly,
| which is, I think, rather good evidence that writing is a
| technology, not a point of speciation.
|
| Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates didn't even believe in
| the effectiveness of writing for communication of knowledge. My
| poetry professor used to spend some time on this, because it's
| intimately tied to the art of poetry. He would cite a number of
| studies showing our emotional responses are intimately tied to
| our language processing, and that humans are wired to
| emotionally respond to, and remember, stories.
|
| Even before writing, oral histories were passed down for many
| generations. For an extreme example, see:
| https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ .
|
| I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I
| believe it has to be rooted in something neurological, not
| technological.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| ...but is there another species that writes things down for
| other individuals in their species to reference?
| glenstein wrote:
| I think that's exactly the right question and the answer is
| pretty clear that there is no comparison. I do understand
| that there's a little bit of something going on with water-
| based mammals like orcas and dolphins being able to teach
| certain skills to their young and so there's a notion of
| intergenerational knowledge there. But we're just a
| different order of magnitude in terms of our capability of
| transmitting intergenerational knowledge and it's not even
| close. It's almost disappointing because there's no
| interesting question of comparison between us and other
| species.
|
| As I mentioned in another comment, I'm skeptical of the
| questions that imply a kind of species essentialism,
| suggesting that there's such a thing as a one particular
| trait that distinctly makes us human. I think the real
| answer to questions like that are vast convergences of
| immense clusters of facts relating to our evolutionary
| history and our morphology and so on. I don't think there's
| any like one single thing. But I do think in comparison to
| other species a rather elegant way of distinguishing this
| is to put to our written traditions which as far as I know
| don't really have any precedent. And if that doesn't blow
| you away in terms of how miraculous and special are
| evolutionary trajectory is, I don't suspect anything would.
| But the important thing is that you don't need a species
| essentialism to be impressed with who and what we are.
| Retric wrote:
| Ants, but that's a whole other discussion around what
| constitutes writing.
|
| Which is why people look into specific elements of language
| not just huge generalizations.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| Interesting comment. Why ants? Do they use symbols to
| express complex ideas to each other?
| Retric wrote:
| > Why ants?
|
| It fits the basic concept of writing, where complex ideas
| are communicating through time rather than space.
|
| As to using symbols it depends on what you mean by
| symbols. Though an ants nest is a dark environment so
| writing the way we think of it via coloration would be a
| useless. In such an environment pheromones have inherent
| advantages, but you can't get the same highly detailed
| shapes.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately
| I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological
|
| In terms of intelligence, yes, but in terms of what we've
| achieved then "technology" such as writing/archiving
| certainly has made a massive difference, else we'd be limited
| to what could be built by passing down oral history and
| skills passed from one generation to the next, much like
| Aboriginal Australians.
|
| I suspect that the neurological (& vocal) differences that
| make us more intelligent than other apes are likely extremely
| few - more like "fine tuning" differences than anything
| major.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The question is whether or not cultures that had no writing
| systems were limited to the same level of intelligence
| and/or development that other primates exhibit.
|
| Given that with exception of an interesting knot-encoded
| (Quipu) system for some period of the Inca empire, the
| entire human population of the Americas (at least 15-20% of
| the total human population) fits this description, the
| answer seems to be "no". These cultures built huge cities
| (among the largest in the world at the time), used
| sophisticated irrigation schemes, ceramics technology and
| more.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yes, for sure humans are fundamentally more intelligent
| than other primates, but still it does seem that writing
| and written communication is a big capability unlock.
|
| It's impressive, and perhaps a bit surprising, what a
| culture like the Incas were able to achieve using only
| (we assume) oral tradition and passing down of skills,
| but there must be a limit to the complexity of what can
| be passed down this way - more along the lines of the
| skillset of an individual man being passed to an
| apprentice, but presumably also "managers/planners"
| passing down skills as well as tradesmen.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| There was literacy in the Americas prior to Columbus.
| Among the Aztecs, the tlacuilos (scribes) were educated
| in the calmecac.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isthmian_script
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec_hieroglyphs
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapotec_script
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixtec_writing
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_script
| retrac wrote:
| Just to be pedantic, it is unclear if the Aztecs had
| "full writing". The notation system in the codices is
| probably more like a kind of mnemonic and accounting
| system along with a calendar. They probably couldn't
| write arbitrary sentences. But so little material
| survives we don't actually know!
|
| The Maya though absolutely had "full writing" at least
| during the classical phase around 200 - 800 AD, and their
| writing probably derived from the older Olmec system. The
| Maya system worked much like classical Japanese or
| ancient Egyptian, and uses a mix of ideographs and purely
| phonetic symbols. They could, and did, write anything
| they could say. There are historical accounts of battles
| and names and etc. given in monumental inscriptions. And
| it is almost certain during the classical era that the
| Maya had full literature, with stories, mythology,
| histories, anthologies, religious scripture, etc. There
| were probably still priests who could read the Maya
| system when the Spanish arrived - one Jesuit recorded
| notes that indicate some of the phonetic values of some
| of the symbols correctly! - but they were mostly killed
| and most of the codices burned by the conquistadors.
|
| It was not deciphered again until the 1970s and it's
| sadly still not widely appreciated that Mesoamerica had
| literate civilizations.
|
| Fun fact: The Maya were such good astronomers and record-
| keepers that we have exact date alignment, which we have
| neither for Ancient Egypt or for Mesopotamia. For example
| any dates in Assyrian records are subject to a ~40 year
| window of uncertainty for exactly when they occurred.
| There is no such ambiguity for the Maya: Pacal the Great
| almost certainly died on August 29, 683.
| glenstein wrote:
| >If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups
| of humans who never developed a writing system to be
| significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know
| that's not true.
|
| I'm not sure I understand why this would necessarily be what
| you would expect. I would say it's entirely the other way
| around. If we have some sort of favorable evolutionary
| circumstances that predispose us to turn into archivists,
| that might be at the frontier of the outer limits of the
| capability we're able to reach, so it might only show up in
| certain pockets or subsets of our overall population. Getting
| there would still hinge on favorable probabilities and
| circumstances that might only obtain in a small percentage of
| cases.
|
| As for Socrates, I must confess I am rather smitten with him
| as a historical figure and as a philosopher, but for the many
| great things that Socrates is, I don't think he's a reliable
| authority for the evolutionary history of humanity writ
| large. I suspect that you're entirely right that oral
| traditions are more emotionally resonant and powerful than
| written traditions. But don't think there's any logical
| fallacy or contradiction in supposing that nevertheless a
| written tradition could emerge in parallel with oral
| traditions.
|
| I suppose I do agree with your end point though, which is
| that I'm not sure that a disposition towards the writing can
| be pointed to as like a singular thing that's at the essence
| of what it is to be human. In fact, I would say that that
| very question is kind of romanticized and abstract in a way
| that doesn't make clear contact with our scientific
| understanding and therefore is kind of a malformed question.
| But I don't have to agree with that form of question to
| nevertheless believe that our capability to put language into
| a written form had rather transcendent consequences for us as
| a species.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > If we have some sort of favorable evolutionary
| circumstances that predispose us to turn into archivists
|
| Intelligence - predicting the future rather than reacting
| to the present - unlocks the possibility of communicating
| about the future rather than just the present (basic animal
| calls - predator alerts, intimidation threats, mating
| calls, etc), which means the message can have value in the
| future if stored and transmitted (unlike a predator alert
| which is useless if not delivered in the moment).
|
| It seems that writing, or proto-writing (drawings become
| symbolic glyphs?), probably developed before message
| carrying/sending, which then becomes the big capability
| unlock - the ability to send/spread information and
| therefore for humans to become a "collective intelligence"
| able to build upon each other's discoveries.
|
| It's interesting why some groups of humans never culturally
| developed along this path though - aboriginees and forest
| peoples who have no written language. Is it because of
| their mode of life, or population density perhaps? Cultural
| isolation? Why have these groups not found the utility for
| written language?
|
| Apparently as recently as 1800 global literacy rate was
| only around 10% - perhaps just a reflection that in the
| modern world you can passively benefit from the products of
| our collective intelligence without yourself being part of
| the exchange, or perhaps a reflection that desire for
| information is not the norm for our species - more for the
| intelligentsia?!
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Don't forget that homo sapiens is not the only humanoid
| species to evolve on this planet. We had a few different
| contemporaries in prehistory.
| cpa wrote:
| I'd love for that to be true, but our species dates back
| 300,000 years, while writing started only 3,000 years ago.
| Writing is definitely not a fundamental trait of our species,
| although once we got this update, things started moving
| quickly.
| barbazoo wrote:
| More like 5000 or 6000 years ago at least for permanent
| writing I'd say? I definitely read about cuneiform tablets
| and cylinders from 3500BCE.
|
| Before that might have been on wood so we don't know much
| about it.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| The oldest known cave paintings are 50,000+ years old. Those
| count as archived information :) It's pictographic
| information but it _is_ stored information :) About a hunt or
| a ceremony or a disaster or ...
| jimkleiber wrote:
| What about oral histories? Why does it need to be written
| if it can be memorized and shared verbally?
| mattdeboard wrote:
| I think it's very possible there are other species that
| use "oral history" to convey information to their
| children, like whales, dolphins, etc., so it's not "safe"
| -- again just IMO -- to consider it uniquely human.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess it is hard to say... if you looked at humans in
| any random moment when we've been around, I suppose we'd
| look a lot like dolphins (not making much increments
| progress generation-to-generation).
|
| But, it does feel like there's something in our
| storytelling tendency, maybe just a quantitative
| difference (we do it a little bit more and some up with
| slightly better summaries) that creates a qualitative one
| (positive feedback loop in our ability to reason about
| the universe).
|
| From that point of view, writing is just an iteration of
| the loop. A big one, though.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| How do you explain the advancement of cultural practices and
| tools during the 95% of time (assuming 100k years) that
| behaviorally modern humans lived prior to inventing writing
| 5,000 years ago? This includes the invention of agriculture and
| large scale building projects like Gobleki Tepe and so on.
| Also, there were cities for thousands of years before writing
| was invented.
|
| I'm definitely no scholar, just a guy that is interested in
| prehistory.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| I'm not saying there wasn't any cultural advancement prior to
| the invention of using written language to store information
| for use by others. Just that there wasn't any human behavior
| that distinguished it as unique among all other species on
| earth.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow, which other animals have cities and
| agriculture?
| mattdeboard wrote:
| Bees.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I never even considered insects but bees are a perfect
| example, I can see where you're coming from now. A hive
| as a city, honey as a crop they farm by collecting pollen
| and refining it. There's even specialized roles and a
| class hierarchy, just like humans! Ants build nests that
| could similarly be considered cities as well.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > rather the fact we write down what we know
|
| Writing is a _very_ recent invention, about 5-6kya for the
| oldest known script, and effectively one of the _last_
| inventions of the Neolithic package. We see urban developments
| that well predate writing; Catalhoyuk is something like 10kya,
| and that is roughly contemporary with the earliest
| domestication of crops and animals.
|
| Even full on state-based civilization can happen in the absence
| of writing systems--Teotihuacan rather famously was not a
| literate society, even going so far as to exert hegemony over
| literate Mayan city-states and _still_ not adopt any writing or
| proto-writing system. (There are also societies like the Wari
| and the Inca, which had quipu, themselves something that make
| you ask "what _is_ a writing system? ").
| gnulinux wrote:
| > Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society
|
| Isn't this going a bit too far? Sure they didn't have a
| modern writing system like Mayans, or even proto-writing
| systems like Inca's quipu but we do have hard evidence of
| Teotihuacan society communicating language with painted
| symbols (e.g. findings in La Ventilla). It's unclear to me
| how we can say they didn't leave writing to future
| generations (especially assuming probably there were a lot
| more stuff that was lost to time than we can see)
|
| Also, this comment seems to slightly misunderstand what the
| GP said imho. Yes writing is a new invention, but e.g.
| paintings in Lascaux are about 17k years old. Which means
| even before Catalhoyuk level civilizations, humans were
| leaving symbols for later generations to look and decipher.
| This is the same "archival" process GP is talking about.
| Humans leave a message to future generations. It seems like
| our biology must prime us to do it, because we see it
| universally. Whether the messages we leave are writing,
| painting, music or whatever... humans still produce things
| for people that'll come after them. But animals are incapable
| of doing so, even if a Bonobo is roughly as intelligent as a
| human, it's not like it can transmit any kind of information
| to future generations, so every generation of Bonobos need to
| learn either from scratch or from their community. So,
| perhaps ironically, part of being human-smart is having
| human-precise hands that can paint/write. Without this
| ability, we end up like bonobos, elephants, dolphins etc
| perhaps smart but for all they know their parents were the
| Adam and Eve.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| great point about our "biomorphology" being a perhaps-
| essential building block of the uniquely human ability to
| convey information symbolically for later retrieval.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Agree with most of what you're saying here, but:
|
| > But animals are incapable of doing so, even if a Bonobo
| is roughly as intelligent as a human, it's not like it can
| transmit any kind of information to future generations, so
| every generation of Bonobos need to learn either from
| scratch or from their community.
|
| We just don't know if this is true.
| dennis_moore wrote:
| Cultural learning has definitely been observed in
| animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_culture
| keybored wrote:
| Why do you have a strongly held armchair belief about
| anthropology? Just research it for ten minutes.
|
| Some beliefs should be lightly held.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| > Why do you have a strongly held armchair belief?
|
| What an interesting thing to say/ask.
| keybored wrote:
| Where's the lie?
| antonkar wrote:
| You're directionally right, modern comparative mythology
| studies suggest that people were telling stories ~100 000 years
| ago when they went out of Africa, they had an "oral library".
| We find many similar tropes alongside their migration roads.
|
| The top specialist is Berezkin, he collected thousands of
| tropes and put it on a map http://www.mythologydatabase.com/bd/
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. which
| is problematic.
|
| However arguably humans existed from tens of thousands of years
| and only really started to make huge technological leaps when
| writing existed. Prewriting culture is still quite fascinating
| and complex (ex: Homer or Olmec/Maya art) but it does seem to
| be stuck at a certain level.
|
| I think Egyptian civilization provides a fascinating mid point
| where there is writing but it's not very accessible... And
| Egyptian civilization is slow to develop (it's also very weird
| they don't have their equivalent of Homer or Gilgamesh)
| igravious wrote:
| > (it's also very weird they don't have their equivalent of
| Homer or Gilgamesh)
|
| i'm not sure if this is the case or not but if it is lack of
| evidence may not be evidence of a lack! they may have done
| and it may have not been transmitted to us
| glenstein wrote:
| >By that metric Native Americans are basically animals..
|
| The Cherokee had an extremely well developed written
| tradition, so I don't think that inference would follow at
| all.
| earleybird wrote:
| From the early 1800's, created by a single person.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
| mattdeboard wrote:
| Awesome. A truly impressive feat that, among all the
| various and sundry species populating the earth, is only
| achievable by a human. That is exactly my point... thank
| you! :)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| But also not a part of the human experience among all the
| ancestors of the Cherokee people, or more or less all
| humans in the Americas, all the way back to whenever
| humans first arrived in the Americas (likely 25k-30k
| years ago, at least).
| mattdeboard wrote:
| Cave drawings throughout the American southwest demonstrate
| Native Americans of antiquity were just as capable of
| expressing symbolic thought via a durable medium to express
| meaning to other humans as so-called modern humans.
|
| I know I'm arguably moving the goalposts here from "writing
| stuff down for others to read" to "using symbols on a durable
| medium to express meaning to other humans." But that's a
| category of behavior that writing belongs to so I don't think
| it's logically inconsistent. :)
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I don't think this really holds. we know, for example, that
| there were precolombian civilizations that wrote things down
| like the Maya and the Aztec, though much of it was destroyed
| during colonization.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There are dozens (maybe even hundreds) of human cultures that
| existed at the time Homer was writing, or when Gilgamesh was
| written, that also have no equivalent.
|
| The idea that any roughly equivalent human culture will
| develop the same things is clearly wrong. Just look at the
| plough - for centuries or even millenia, humans outside of
| what is now China had ploughs but failed to gain the insight
| to improve it in the way it was improved in China. Once trade
| exposed them to the Chinese plough, it was more or less
| universally adopted within decades.
|
| While multiple (re)invention may be common, it is not
| universal. Just because culture A manages to find is way to
| cultural/technological innovation doesn't imply that culture
| B will, even if the two cultures are very similar.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _By that metric Native Americans are basically animals..
| which is problematic._
|
| just as it's not problematic to discover that bonobos talk to
| each other like Shakespeare, it would not be problematic to
| discover that humans are animals. keep your fingers off the
| scales (and, to mix a metaphor) let the scales fall from your
| eyes: it's science, follow the evidence to the truth. Don't
| be guided by what you want to hear, in either direction.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| To my knowledge Homo Sapiens developed long before writing was
| used. And there are plenty of tribes who use only oral
| transmission. I agree with the idea that we are archivists, be
| it written or oral. With written you can archive much more info
| though.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we're
| able to control fire.
|
| By a strict definition of writing (e.g. what we're doing now),
| people have only been able to write for a few thousand years,
| and much of the adult population was illiterate until recently.
| Define it widely enough (visual communication of information),
| and some other animals (e.g. tigers) also "write":
| https://animalresearcher.com/why-do-tigers-scrape-trees-at-s...
|
| You could reasonably argue though, that we have passed on
| information over long periods of time orally, e.g. in epic
| poems, and that (as far as we know) no other animal does that.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| Re: oral transmission , I'm operating under the
| (unsubstantiated) assumption at least some species of
| dolphins and whales, at least, are conveying "tribal"
| information orally between generations (locations of reliable
| hunting grounds, stuff like that). There's no definitive
| proof of this, afaik, it's just something that seems likelier
| than not to me.
|
| Re: defining it broadly... The definition I've landed on thru
| defending my stated belief in these comments is, "Conveying
| information symbolically by etching it into or onto a durable
| medium so it can be referred to later."
|
| But I guess an important quality of "writing" is that it's
| information that could otherwise be communicated with spoken
| language, and that the written and spoken languages are
| isomorphic.. maybe?
|
| Honestly this is the first time I've put this idea out into
| the world for criticism so I'm still working thru these
| things :)
| starspangled wrote:
| > The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that
| we're able to control fire.
|
| There is some suggestion that other animals can control fire.
|
| https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/fire-not-
| jus...
|
| I don't know if that's completely verified or not, but it
| seems like a problematic definition. You could imagine a
| group of intelligent birds or apes could discover ways to
| control fire.
|
| No, the thing that truly sets us apart from other animals is
| the ability to create the hydrogen bomb.
| darksaints wrote:
| Writing is a new phenomenon. It's certainly a novel ability,
| but genetically we were around for a few million years before
| we even developed civilization, tens of thousands more before
| behavioral modernity, and only in the last 10k years have we
| developed writing. But other commenters have already said as
| much.
|
| I would contest that what makes us unique is recursion as a
| general ability. In that sense, writing is a method of
| recursively building knowledge. But we also have it with spoken
| language, as we recursively build vocabulary and grammar into
| complex communication. We have it with tools, as we are the
| only species (at least as far as I know) that uses tools to
| make tools. We also seem to have it with our physical
| abilities: witness the constantly broken records in competition
| sports.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| Chimps and crows are documented using tools to make tools.
| Crows in particular can make compound tools. Orangs make
| cutting tools out of two rocks they pound together.
|
| Neither tool use nor manufacture is uniquely human!
| timeon wrote:
| This part of title is interesting: "...once thought to be
| unique to humans"
|
| Which could apply to anything in future.
| NoTeslaThrow wrote:
| This seems sort of a secondary cause of our unique linguistic
| abilities. Afaik no other animal can use recursive grammars.
| Certainly not to the same extent.
|
| Anyway this also excludes all the humans that never wrote
| anything, which is most of them. If anything our verbal history
| is our strongest and most ancient culture.
| 1024core wrote:
| Isn't writing barely 10,000 years old or so? For the longest
| time, humans memorized their stories and passed them down to
| younger generations by rote memorization.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Isn't writing barely 10,000 years old or so?
|
| No, absolutely not. It's barely 5,000 years old.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally
| sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of
| that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make
| those writings available to future generations to build on.
|
| "Strongly held belief" would suggest authority on the subject,
| but I suspect this is not the case. By comparison, while I
| accept the efficacy of vaccines on the authority of the authors
| of scientific texts on immunology and draw on circumstantial
| information to infer probable reliability of said authorities,
| I wouldn't say I have a "strongly held belief" either as this
| would suggest that I, personally, have authority on the
| subject, which I don't. My knowledge, as descriptively rich as
| it might be, nonetheless rests on a chain of authority.
|
| In any case, the first problem in these discussions is the
| superficial notion of "language" that's often employed.
| "Language", as a system of signs, entails signification, and
| the kind of signification human language engages in is not
| merely a degree removed from the kind of signification other
| animals engage in. There is a difference in kind. There is a
| big difference between a distress call and expressing the
| proposition "There are five red berries in the tall bush". A
| distress call requires no abstract concepts; the latter
| proposition requires five. While we can say there is something
| like or analogous to syntactic structure in a distress call or
| some series of joined calls, none of these require concepts.
| And abstraction of concepts is the most central and unique
| faculty of rationality, as it is by means of concepts that we
| can reason _about_ the world. They are the seat of
| intentionality, not mere imagism.
| tombh wrote:
| Whilst some here are critiquing this point of view due to
| writing's recency, there's actually some academic support for
| the ancient impact of "archival" if we can consider a broader
| definition for it, namely: linguistic works such as stories,
| poems, songs etc. A classic study of this is Walter Ong's
| Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
| https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Li...
|
| The basic idea is that say, lyrics, are a technological
| innovation that "stores" information across time and space
| because it aides in recall.
| mppm wrote:
| As others have pointed out, writing is a very recent
| phenomenon, but your intuition seems correct in general - what
| sets humans apart from chimps and bonobos is efficient transfer
| learning to future generations. If you are interested, _The
| Cultural Origins of Human Cognition_ by Michael Tomasello makes
| this point in detail. Tomasello argues that chimps, while being
| impressive learners and problem solvers in some ways, actually
| have extremely inefficient cultural transfer, which prevents
| runaway cultural evolution that has happened in humans.
| simonh wrote:
| I think the key differentiator is Prefrontal Synthesis.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_synthesis
|
| This is the ability to mentally compose conceptual objects in
| complex relationships.
|
| In fact I don't think there really is one single significant
| differentiator. There are many. However without this one
| technology beyond simple single function tools such as a hand
| axe or pointed stick, and simple linguistic statements wouldn't
| be be possible.
|
| The linguistic composition described in the article sound
| similar if dramatically more primitive, but I don't think we
| can assume it comes from a common ancestor. It may well be that
| this capability has a different neurological basis, since these
| animals don't have a prefrontal cortex. So it seems plausible
| this is a case or parallel evolution of a very rudimentary
| similar feature. Fascinating stuff though.
| bobxmax wrote:
| Your strongly held belief that flies in the face of the
| dominant belief among today's leading linguists
| nine_k wrote:
| I would say that the real killer invention of humans, compared
| to other apes, is the way to overcome the Dunbar number and
| organize very large coordinated groups.
|
| The rise of agriculture in Mesopotamia enabled by it predates
| writing systems, and the first cuneiform records are purely
| numerical, for asset tracking. Huge armies, like these of
| Alexander or Genghis Khan, consisted of mostly illiterate
| warriors.
|
| I'd argue that the invention of the virtual hierarchies, when a
| peasant submits to a king who he never saw in person,
| eventually led to the invention of gods, and later a supreme
| "creator of the universe" figure. That allowed for even more
| complex cooperative social structures, still across mostly
| illiterate populations, even though holy scriptures play a
| central role in such religions.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make
| those writings available to future generations to build
|
| As far as we can tell humans were doing that orally for
| thousands of years before writing became a thing.
|
| You had major civilizations with complex bureaucracies that
| were not effectively almost entirely illiterate..
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Interesting that this is the only place on the internet where
| "Homo Archivum" has ever been uttered.
| DadBase wrote:
| If bonobos start using syntax, it's only a matter of time before
| they demand a seat at the dinner table and correct my grammar
| mid-banana.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Fortunately bonobos have not yet learned to say "No".
| WalterBright wrote:
| > One core block is syntax, where meaningful units are combined
| into longer sequences, like words into sentences.
|
| I would think that syntax is a _structure_ to the sequence of
| symbols, not just a sequence in any order. For example:
| Thag ate Fish Fish ate Thag
|
| have different meanings.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Syntax is hierarchical, and not as much sequential as you may
| think. LLMs are based on these two facts.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I think your sentence would be much more accurate if you
| replace hierarchical with recursive.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| True, at least conceptually (does brain actually do
| recursion?) - I was really thinking of linguist's
| hierarchical sentence parse trees, which are a nice visual
| representation of how different parts of sentence are
| syntactically unrelated and can therefore be processed in
| parallel, with levels of the "hierarchy" then corresponding
| to layers of the LLM.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > For example, the phrase "blonde dancer" has two independent
| units: a blonde person who is also a dancer.
|
| This seems a rather odd "random" language example, especially
| coming from New Scientist. Being politically correct by then
| referring to the "blonde" as a "person" doesn't help much. May as
| well just use "brunette stripper" as an example - a brown haired
| person who takes their clothes off for money.
| someoneontenet wrote:
| I think that you might be taking that example in bad faith.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Really? How often are blonde-haired men referred to as
| "blondes" vs women, and if you really feel the need to use
| "blonde" as your adjective, but insist it's a sexless
| "person", then how about "blonde engineer" instead of "blonde
| dancer"?!
|
| I've got nothing against blonde dancers, and am far from
| politically correct myself, but in a scientific article about
| language and Bonobos, couldn't they have chosen a more
| appropriate example such as "yellow banana"?
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > How often are blonde-haired men referred to as "blondes"
| vs women
|
| Never, because men's hair is "blond".
|
| But seriously, the original quote does not call the person
| "a blonde," (which indeed might offend some) but instead
| uses "blonde" as an adjective to describe the dancer, which
| is perfectly acceptable. You can have a "blond man" or a
| "brown-haired man" just as easily as you can have a "blonde
| woman".
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Well, as an example of language/syntax, any language
| example (including "blonde dancer") would be
| "acceptable", but in this context something like "fruit
| tree" might be more appropriate than "dumb Polack" (no
| offense - just a syntax example).
| AIPedant wrote:
| No, because "bad dancer" is used to illustrate meaning
| changing in a complex way; it is a person who is bad at
| dancing, not a bad person who is dancing. Whereas "bad
| banana" is a bad banana; "bad" operates the same way as
| "yellow" on "banana", but "bad" and "blonde" operate
| differently on "dancer."
|
| Really seems like you're trying to enforce your own form of
| political correctness here - "PC" is associated with
| certain progressives, but the problem is policing language
| and picking fights over trivial nonsense.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Surely bad and blonde (not intended to imply gender) are
| just adjectives - a dancer who is bad (at dancing), or a
| dancer who is blonde?
|
| Trust me, if you met me you would not be suggesting I am
| PC - but this really jumped off the page at me. Such a
| strange example for this context!
| geoelectric wrote:
| The fact you had to clarify "at dancing" is why they're
| different.
|
| Think about it as a decomposition where "dancer" means
| "dancing person."
|
| In the simple case, both "blonde" and "dancing"
| separately modify "person." If you diagram that it's a Y:
| either modifier could be removed without changing the
| meaning of the other, and their order isn't important.
|
| In the complex case, "bad" modifies "dancing," which
| together modify "person." That's an ordered chain, which
| is more complex to build and comprehend. Your
| clarification illustrates the chaining and why it'd be a
| fundamentally different meaning if that wasn't
| understood.
|
| I'm not even touching whatever you were going for with
| the blonde/brunette thing. It's plain they used the
| example because there's no possible way hair color could
| be a modifier for "dancing," and they wanted something
| unambiguous.
| d332 wrote:
| > This finding doesn't mean that bonobos have language, though,
| because language is the human communication system
|
| I hate this attitude.
|
| Also, I'm curious how advances in AI will shape our empathy
| towards animals.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I really wonder if that's a misquote or poor paraphrase. It's
| not in quotation marks.
|
| > This finding doesn't mean that bonobos have language, though,
| because language is the human communication system, says
| Berthet. "But we're showing that they have a very complex
| communication system that shares parallels with human
| language."
| ang_cire wrote:
| Peak anthropocentrism. You see this attitude all over,
| unfortunately even in circles that should know better. It even
| feels circular, like saying "Language is how we know people are
| more 'advanced' than animals, but animals can never have
| language, because language is what humans do."
| linguistbreaker wrote:
| Cool!
|
| Now do it for cetaceans.
| mkl wrote:
| > Now we have evidence that both chimps and bonobos have syntax,
| it is inevitable that this capacity for compositionality was
| inherited from our last common ancestor, says Leroux. "They just
| showed, unambiguously, that this core building block is
| evolutionary ancient and at least 7 million years old, and maybe
| even older."
|
| This is not true at all. It's like saying that tool construction
| must be >300 million years old because both chimpanzees and New
| Caledonian crows make tools. Things can be invented or discovered
| multiple times by different species. It _might_ be inherited from
| a common source, but it might not.
| jterwill wrote:
| It is exciting times in animal communication.
|
| This is not just distributional information analysis in the sense
| that 'tokens' are grounded in other 'tokens'. They've grounded
| these calls in naturalistic situational context. This is hard won
| data.
|
| If I understand, the finding here is that bonobo calls are "non-
| trivially" compositional, e.g., the semantic embeddings of pairs
| of vocalizations point in different directions surrounding the
| base vocalization. But it seems there is no "trivial"
| compositionality in the sense that constructions like [good __]
| might point in a similar direction. I would expect this latter
| result. This seems like a conspicuous absence? Is this really
| compositionality? Not sure what to make of it.
|
| Some interesting context: bonobos and other (non-human) great
| apes are believed to have more intentional and flexible control
| over their gestural repertoire than their vocal repertoire and
| that these gestural repertoires are larger. Human language likely
| evolved from gesture (or so some believe). So, if their
| vocalizations are in fact compositional, it may be a separate
| evolutionary prong.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Might this explain why Italians can't talk if you tie their
| hands?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Is this really compositionality?
|
| Usually it would be called "noncompositionality", the
| phenomenon that distinguishes words from phrases or sentences.
| As you might expect from that term, it's the opposite of
| compositionality. It also goes under the fancier name "the
| arbitrariness of the sign" or the even fancier "l'arbitraire du
| signe".
|
| For example, _hat_ , _sat_ , _bat_ , and _flat_ are all
| semantically unlike each other, and _flare_ , _phlegm_ ,
| _flick_ , and _flood_ are also all semantically unlike each
| other. It isn 't the case that you can predict the meaning of
| _flat_ by knowing what _hat_ , _sat_ , _bat_ , _flare_ ,
| _phlegm_ , _flick_ , and _flood_ mean.
|
| The article draws an analogy to a general syntactic rule:
|
| > But, so far, only "trivial compositionality" has been
| identified in non-human animals, whereby each unit adds
| independently to the meaning of the whole. For example, the
| phrase "blonde dancer" has two independent units: a blonde
| person who is also a dancer. Humans were thought to be unique
| in also having "non-trivial compositionality", where the words
| in a combination means something different to what they mean
| individually. For example, the phrase "bad dancer" doesn't mean
| a bad person who also dances.
|
| _Bad dancer_ is compositional in that you can know the meaning
| of the phrase by knowing the meanings of _bad_ and _dancer_. So
| far so good; the article agrees that it is compositional.
|
| They observe that the two words in the phrase aren't
| independent; a _one-legged dancer_ is a dancer who has one leg,
| but a _bad dancer_ isn 't a dancer who is bad in general; it's
| a person who is bad at dancing.
|
| The reason this is still compositional is that you can use any
| appropriate adjective this way: you can be a _strong dancer_ ,
| an _energetic dancer_ , a _timid dancer_... so this is just a
| rule about the formation of certain English phrases, and
| knowing what _bad_ means in general is sufficient to know what
| _bad_ means in the phrase _bad dancer_.
|
| They don't appear to be making a similar claim for the bonobos:
|
| > For example, "high-hoot + low-hoot" combines the calls that
| seem to mean "pay attention to me" and "I am excited" to say
| "pay attention to me because I am in distress"
|
| This example looks more like an arbitrary sign to me. But that
| might be an artifact of poor data management:
|
| > they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of
| utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar
| circumstances closer together. "We kind of established this
| dictionary," says Berthlet. "We have one vocalisation and one
| meaning."
|
| There is no reason to expect that one vocalisation should
| possess only one meaning.
|
| They also have poor methodology:
|
| > Once they had this semantic cloud, they could see whether the
| individual calls in a combination had distinct meanings, and
| found that the combinations were close to the units that they
| were made of, which would suggest compositionality. Using this
| approach, they identified four compositional calls
|
| By comparison, _throw_ , _throw up_ , and _throw away_ are all
| similar in meaning, which is why they have similar forms, but
| they are not compositional - knowing what one of them means won
| 't help you with the others.
| glial wrote:
| Cue the goalpost moving.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| This is certainly interesting, but I'm not sure I'd call this
| "syntax" (and I'm no Chomskyan).
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